While the vast majority of purchases from our website go off without a hitch, I do receive the occasional email from customers experiencing issues. As it happens, these issues tend to fall into a couple of common areas, which are easily solved or avoided, so let’s take a look at them.

Purchasing

This is a relatively straightforward process, and the feedback I’ve had about it suggests that there are no real issues with the checkout process. Prices are in Australian dollars, and payment is made via PayPal—you can even checkout using PayPal as a guest, meaning that you don’t need to have a PayPal account to use it.

Downloading

Once the order is placed and payment is made, you should receive an order confirmation email that contains your order details, plus a link to download your purchase. This appears to be the main area where things can go wrong, with customers either not receiving this email, or not realising its significance and deleting it. And don’t forget to check your junk or spam email folder!

The screenshot below shows how the Downloads section of the order confirmation email should appear. There should be one row in the table for each book you purchased. Note the “Download” column at the far right of the table—this contains the link to download that particular book (you’ll need to download each book you have purchased individually):

It’s worth noting that some browsers will launch a new blank window or tab to facilitate the download, and this can make it appear as if the download didn’t work. You should still see a download progress indicator of some description, and the blank window or tab should close once the download has successfully completed.

The book should be downloaded to the default download location set by your browser or operating system. On both macOS and Windows systems, this will be your “Downloads” folder. If you’re not sure whether the book has downloaded, check that location and see if it’s there.

If you don’t receive the order confirmation email, contact me and I can generate another one for you. Depending on the reason for not receiving the initial email, it’s possible you may not receive the second one either. This is where the solution below comes in.

Create an Account

Many of our customers use the guest checkout option (as a guest of the site, as distinct from using the guest payment facility with PayPal), which is quick and easy to do. And while this is convenient, creating a dedicated customer account has several advantages, and we highly recommend doing so!

Firstly, once you’ve created the account, subsequent purchases are actually faster, as you’re no longer asked to supply your details if you make a purchase while logged in.

More importantly, however, is that you then have access to your purchase and download history, and this means that you can log in to your account and download any book you’ve previously purchased from the Downloads section of your account. Not only does this solve the issue of not having received the order confirmation email, but it also means you can log in to your account from a different computer or device to the one that contains the email, and still download the book.

Arguably the most important reason of all to create an account is that it’s the best way to gain access to the regular updates to our books we publish. Any book you purchase is eligible for lifetime free updates—when a new version is available, you simply need to log in to your account and re-download the book again. (If you still have the original order confirmation email containing the download links, they will work too.)

If you’ve already purchased books from the site without a customer account, and then decide to create one, once you’ve done so, I can associate those purchases with your new account, and they will then become part of your purchase history. Please note that this doesn’t happen automatically, so if you’re in that position, contact me with the details and I can make the associations.

Of course, not everyone is interested in creating an account, so if all else fails, contact me and I can get the file to you directly by other means. This should be a last resort, however, and I strongly encourage everyone to create a customer account in order to gain some added control over your purchases, and avoid potential problems into the future!